So this afternoon he walked the streets like a stranger—like an ascetic who has left his dumb solitude for the din and bustle of a town. Everything seemed to him novel and unfamiliar. Yet so unused was he to this world which boiled and seethed around him that he had no room even for astonishment at his own sensations. He had ceased now to feel ill at ease, but, on the contrary, was filled with a joy, an intoxication, which can be compared only to that of a starving man who has just been given meat and drink. Was it not curious that so trivial a turn of fortune as a change of lodgings should be able thus to agitate and bewilder an habitué of St. Petersburg like Ordynov? The truth is that he had hardly ever before been called upon to go out on a business errand.

With increasing delight he pursued his way through the streets; looking at everything in a critical way, and, faithful to his mental habit, reading the pictures which unrolled themselves before him in the same manner that a person reads between the lines of a book. Everything made an impression upon him, and not a single impression escaped him as, with thoughtful gaze, he scanned the faces of the passers-by, and also listened to any conversation which was going on around him, as though he wished to prove the conclusions at which, during the quiet meditations of his lonely nights, he had arrived. Frequently some new trifle would catch his attention, and give rise to a new idea; whereupon he would, for the first time in his life, feel vexed that he should have buried himself alive in his solitary cell. Everything here seemed to move faster. Here his pulse beat more quickly and vigorously; here his intellect, which solitude had but cramped, seemed to be whetted and cheered with its own intense, exultant activity, until it worked with swift precision and assurance. He would have liked to have plunged straight into all this strange life which, as yet, had been wholly unknown to him—or, rather, had been known to him only through his artistic sense. His heart beat with a gust of involuntary love and sympathy as eagerly he set himself to consider the passers-by. Yet suddenly he perceived that some of them looked anxious and absorbed! At this revelation his composure vanished, and the reality of things began to impress him with a sense of respect. He felt himself growing weary of the flood of new impressions which had come upon him, in much the same manner that a sick man, after walking a tentative step or two, suddenly falls to the ground—blinded by the glitter and sparkle and turmoil of life, stunned by the roar of human activity, and confused by the sounds emitted by the ever-changing, ever-seething crowd around him. By degrees Ordynov began to distrust both the tendencies and activities of his present life and his prospects for the future. A thought which particularly troubled him was the circumstance that always he had been alone in the world, without love or the prospect of love. For example, some few passers-by whom, early in his walk, he had tried to engage in conversation had turned from him with an air of brusquerie and estrangement (which, indeed, they had some reason to do); and instantly he had remembered that confidences of his had always been repelled in this way, and that throughout his boyhood persons had invariably avoided him as a youth of dogged, abstracted temperament. In short, he found himself struck with the fact that his sympathy had never known any method of self-disclosure than through ambiguous, painful efforts which were devoid of moral balance. Above all things it had been the constant sorrow of his youth to realise that he was unlike such other boys as were his equals in age; and now that he remembered this he made up his mind that always, and for ever, he would find himself avoided—find himself left to his own devices.